Introduction to Sustainability

This chapter unpacks the concept of sustainability, which refers to the sociopolitical, scientific, and cultural challenges of living within the means of the earth without significantly impairing its function.

Taking The Long View: Sustainability in Evolutionary and Ecological Perspective

Of the different forms of life that have inhabited the Earth in its three to four billion year history, 99.9% are now extinct. Against this backdrop, the human enterprise with its roughly 200,000-year history barely merits attention. But while modern humans (Homo sapiens) might be insignificant in geologic time, we are by no means insignificant in terms of our recent planetary impact. According to a recent article in NewScientist (September, 2023), humans are currently using 25% of all the biomass produced by plants on land each year, but we should only be using about 10% at most in order to keep the planet in a “suitable state for civilization” and for wildlife to survive. Additional recent studies estimate that 25% of photosynthesis on continental shelves (coastal areas) is ultimately being used to satisfy human demand. Human appropriation of such natural resources is having a profound impact upon the wide diversity of other species that also depend on them.

Evolution normally results in the generation of new lifeforms at a rate that outstrips the extinction of other species; this results in strong biological diversity. However, scientists have evidence that, for the first observable time in evolutionary history, another species — Homo sapiens — has upset this balance to the degree that the rate of species extinction is now estimated at 10,000 times the rate of species renewal. Human beings, just one species among millions, are crowding out the other species we share the planet with.

Evidence of human interference with the natural world is visible in practically every ecosystem from the presence of pollutants in the stratosphere and the blubber of North Atlantic orca whales, to the artificially changed courses of the majority of river systems on the planet. It is argued that ever since we abandoned nomadic, gatherer-hunter ways of life for settled agrarian-based (farming) societies some 12,000 years ago, humans have continually manipulated their natural world to meet their needs. While this observation is a correct one, the rate, scale, and the nature of human-induced global change — particularly in the post-industrial period — is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth.

There are three primary reasons for this:

1. Firstly, mechanization of both industry and agriculture in the last century resulted in vastly improved labor productivity which enabled the creation of goods and services. Since then, scientific advance and technological innovation — powered by ever-increasing inputs of fossil fuels and their derivatives — have revolutionized every industry and created many new ones. The subsequent development of western consumer culture, and the satisfaction of the accompanying disposable mentality, has generated material flows of an unprecedented scale. The Wuppertal Institute estimates that humans are now responsible for moving greater amounts of matter across the planet than all natural occurrences (earthquakes, storms, etc.) put together.
2. Secondly, the sheer size of the human population is unprecedented. Every passing year adds another 90 million people to the planet. Even though the environmental impact varies significantly between countries (and within them), the exponential growth in human numbers, coupled with rising material expectations in a world of limited resources, has catapulted the issue of distribution to prominence. Global inequalities in resource consumption and purchasing power mark the clearest dividing line between the haves and the have-nots. It has become apparent that present patterns of production and consumption are unsustainable for a global population that is projected to reach approximately 9.7 billion by the year 2050. If ecological crises and rising social conflict are to be countered, the present rates of over-consumption by a rich minority, and under-consumption by a large majority, will have to be brought into balance.
3. Thirdly, it is not only the rate and the scale of change but the nature of that change that is unprecedented. Human inventiveness has introduced chemicals and materials into the environment which either do not occur naturally at all, or do not occur in the ratios in which we have introduced them. These persistent organic pollutants are believed to be causing alterations in the biosphere and geochemical cycles, the effects of which are only slowly manifesting themselves, and the full scale of which is beyond calculation. CFCs and PCBs are but two examples of the approximately 100,000 chemicals currently in global circulation (between 500 and 1,000 new chemicals are being added to this list annually). The majority of these chemicals have not been tested for their toxicity on humans and other life forms, let alone tested for their effects in combination with other chemicals. These issues are now the subject of special UN and other intergovernmental working groups.

The Evolution of Sustainability Itself

While Our Common Future, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (commonly known as the Brundtland Commission) is widely credited with having popularized the concept of sustainable development, it does in fact have a longer lineage. The year 1972 was a watershed in marking both the first International Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and the publication of the provocative report Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome which highlighted the imminent threat of ‘overshoot’ (a systems-analysis term for exceeding carrying capacity). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s a steady stream of books and reports began to appear, preoccupied with the question of environment and development. This stream would turn into a deluge in the sustainability-friendly 1990s. The World Conservation Strategy, the manifesto published collectively in 1980 by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP — set up after the Stockholm conference), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), stands out as an early — but at the time largely overlooked — international attempt at mobilizing public action to address emergent environmental challenges.

Of course, the concept of sustainability can be traced back much farther to the oral histories of indigenous cultures. For example, the principle of inter-generational equity is captured in the Inuit saying, ‘we do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children’. The ‘Seventh Generation Principle’ said to be based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy and historically espoused by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is another illustration. According to this principle, before any major action was to be undertaken its potential consequences on the seventh generation had to be considered. For a species that at present is only 6,000 generations old and whose current political decision-makers operate on time scales of months or a few years at most, the thought that other human cultures have based their decision-making systems on time scales of many decades seems wise but often inconceivable in the current political climate.

Environmental Equity

While much progress is being made to improve resource efficiency, far less progress has been made to improve resource distribution.
The UN Environment Program’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 report sums up the issue succinctly:

At the heart of global resource use are fundamental inequalities: low-income countries consume six times less materials and generate 10 times less climate impacts than those living in high-income countries. Upper middle-income countries have more than doubled resource use in the past 50 years due to their own growth in infrastructure and the relocation of resource intensive processes from high-income countries. At the same time, per capita resource use and related environmental impacts in low-income countries has remained relatively low and almost unchanged since 1995.  

So far, global income inequalities and lack of purchasing power have prevented poorer countries from reaching the standard of living (and also resource consumption/waste emission) of the industrialized countries.

Countries such as China, Brazil, India, and Malaysia are, however, catching up fast. In such a situation, global consumption of resources and energy needs to be drastically reduced to a point where it can be repeated by future generations. But who will do the reducing? Poorer nations want to produce and consume more. Yet so do richer countries: their economies demand ever greater consumption-based expansion. Such stalemates have prevented any meaningful progress towards equitable and sustainable resource distribution at the international level. These issues of fairness and distributional justice remain unresolved.

Concepts in Environmental Science

The ecological footprint (EF), developed by Canadian ecologist and planner William Rees, is an accounting tool that uses land as the unit of measurement to assess per capita consumption, production, and discharge/waste absorption and processing needs. It starts from the elementary assumption that every category of energy and material consumption and waste discharge requires the productive or absorptive capacity of a finite area of land or water. If we add up all the land requirements for all categories of consumption and waste discharge by a defined population, the total area represents the Ecological Footprint of that population on Earth whether or not this area coincides with the population’s home region.

Land is used as the unit of measurement for the simple reason that ‘Land area not only captures planet Earth’s finiteness, it can also be seen as a proxy for numerous essential life support functions from gas exchange to nutrient recycling … land supports photosynthesis, the energy conduit for the web of life. Photosynthesis sustains all important food chains and maintains the structural integrity of ecosystems.’

What does the ecological footprint tell us? Ecological footprint analysis can tell us in a vivid, ready-to-grasp manner how much of the Earth’s environmental functions are needed to support human activities. It also makes visible the extent to which consumer lifestyles and behaviors are ecologically sustainable. For example, the calculated ecological footprint of the average Canadian in 2019, according to the Global Footprint Network, was 7.9 global hectares (gha) per person, in order to meet our individual demands for resources and to absorb our waste. Based on these numbers, if the current global population were to adopt Canadian consumer lifestyles we would need 5.08 planet earths to produce the required resources, absorb the wastes, and provide general life-support functions.

The precautionary principle is central to environmental sustainability. A 1998 consensus statement characterized the precautionary principle this way: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

The precautionary principle has arisen because of the perception that the pace of efforts to combat problems such as climate change, ecosystem degradation, and resource depletion is too slow and that environmental and health problems continue to grow more rapidly than society’s ability to identify and correct them. In addition, the potential for catastrophic effects on global ecological systems has weakened confidence in the abilities of environmental science and policy to identify and control hazards.

There are also the apparent contradictions of our regulatory process: if the laws governing toxic chemical release are effective, then why are mercury levels in freshwater fish so high that pregnant women should not eat them? How is it possible that human breast milk may not meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration contaminant limits for baby food? The great complexity, uncertainty, and potential for catastrophe from global climate change are among the strongest motivators for those urging precaution in environmental policy. The precautionary principle, by calling for preventive action even when there is uncertainty, by placing the onus on those who create the hazard, and by emphasizing alternatives and democracy, is viewed by environmentalists as a way to shift the terms of the debate and stimulate change.

 Some Indicators of Global Environmental Stress

Forests—Deforestation and degradation remain the main issues. The UN FAO estimates that 10 million hectares of forest are cut down each year. The largest losses of forest area are taking place in the tropical moist deciduous forests, the zone best suited to human settlement and agriculture; recent estimates suggest that nearly two-thirds of tropical deforestation is due to farmers clearing land for agriculture. There is increasing concern about the decline in forest quality associated with intensive use of forests and unregulated access.

Soil — As much as 10% of the earth’s vegetated surface is now at least moderately degraded. Trends in soil quality and management of irrigated land raise serious questions about longer-term sustainability. It is estimated that about 20% of the world’s 250 million hectares of irrigated land are already degraded to the point where crop production is seriously reduced.

Fresh water — Some 20% of the world’s population lacks access to safe water and 50% lacks access to safe sanitation. If current trends in water use persist, two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in countries experiencing moderate or high water stress by 2025.

Marine fisheries — 25% of the world’s marine fisheries are being fished at their maximum level of productivity and 35% are over-fished (yields are declining). In order to maintain current per capita consumption of fish, global fish harvests must be increased; much of the increase might come through aquaculture which is a known source of water pollution and parasite activity which can affect wild fish populations (e.g. pacific salmon), wetland loss and mangrove swamp destruction.

Biodiversity — Biodiversity is increasingly coming under threat from development, which destroys or degrades natural habitats, and from pollution from a variety of sources. The first comprehensive global assessment of biodiversity put the total number of species at close to 14 million and found that between 1% and 11% of the world’s species may be threatened by extinction every decade. Coastal ecosystems, which host a very large proportion of marine species, are at great risk with perhaps one-third of the world’s coasts at high potential risk of degradation and another 17% at moderate risk.

Atmosphere — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has established that human activities are having a discernible influence on global climate. In response, the international community, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Paris Agreement (2015), aims to “…strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” Despite these agreements, CO₂ emissions in most industrialised countries have either remained static or risen during the past few years and the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) agreed to at Paris have been criticized by some climate experts as still putting the world on an emissions trajectory that could result in a temperate increase between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Climate expert, Kevin Anderson, has been quoted as saying, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

Toxic chemicals — About 100,000 chemicals are now in commercial use and their potential impacts on human health and ecological function represent largely unknown risks. Persistent organic pollutants are now so widely distributed by air and ocean currents that they are found in the tissues of people and wildlife everywhere; they are of particular concern because of their high levels of toxicity and persistence in the environment.

Hazardous wastes — Pollution from heavy metals, especially from their use in industry and mining, is also creating serious health consequences in many parts of the world. Incidents and accidents involving uncontrolled radioactive sources continue to increase, and particular risks are posed by the legacy of contaminated areas left from military activities involving nuclear materials.

Waste — Domestic and industrial waste production continues to increase in both absolute and per capita terms, worldwide. In the developed world, per capita waste generation has increased threefold over the past 20 years; in developing countries, it is highly likely that waste generation will double during the next decade. The level of awareness regarding the health and environmental impacts of inadequate waste disposal remains rather poor; poor sanitation and waste management infrastructure is still one of the principal causes of death and disability for the urban poor.

Attribution

Essentials of Environmental Science by Kamala Doršner is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modified from the original.